Agencies Using The Crowd And Trada In Order To Provide Marketing Services Says CEO Robertson

Trada, a PPC marketing campaign marketplace, announced this week that in the interest of servicing agencies who "were being asked by their clients to offer paid search…and it wasn’t an area that agencies necessarily cared about," the company has updated it's marketplace to make it easy for agencies to use. Read more on the Trada blog.

Niel Robertson of Trada discussed the update to the marketplace and momentum for the company.

AdExchanger.com: How is this new version of the Trada marketplace different than the old one in terms of serving advertising agencies?

NR: We already work with a number of agencies from small 2 person shops to top ten agencies. After spending nearly six months working with them, we came to appreciate that one of the primary functions they provide to their clients is simplifying the vast data collection, integration and explanation required to understand what is going on in a paid search campaign. This process across 3 ad networks (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) is incredibly cumbersome for the agency. Once they have downloaded the data, normalizing it and integrating it into a custom agency branded spreadsheet for the client is another arduous process. The first Trada agency feature set is focused on simplifying this data extraction and normalization process. For any date range, the agency can extract their customer’s data across all ad networks into one normalized spreadsheet which they can quickly repurpose into their standard agency format. In the near future we plan to add multi-client overviews and branded interfaces for those agencies that want to directly expose the Trada advertiser interface to their clients.

Any trends you can share about how agencies are using Trada? Are their particular verticals that make sense for agencies to use Trada?

NR: We’ve been delighted at the breadth of customer types that we’ve seen adopt and succeed with Trada. We have many retail clients as well as growing number of financial sector clients, real estate, software lead generation, automotive, travel and local services (doctors, lawyers, hospitals). One of the reasons we are successful across such a broad cross section of paid search advertisers is that our marketplace (now more than 500 experts and growing quickly) is simply likely to have a number of PPC experts in it that already know your vertical. Because optimizers (what we call our PPC experts) opt into campaigns that they are familiar with, the basic scale of the market can fulfill demand in so many categories.

When are you launching something for display? It can't be far off it would seem. What might be the peculiar challenges in display that might prevent crowdsourcing display ad service providers?

Frankly, there are a number of other advertising types (display, profile targeting, social, etc..) that present major challenges and opportunities for our advertisers. The most common problem is simply the complexity of managing these advertising forms against a specific CPA goal. Which blogs should you put an ad on? Which video? Who’s Facebook profile should you target? How do they convert and thus how much should you pay for them? We feel like there are some very common problems we’ve solved in paid search that apply to display and other forms of performance based advertising. We also believe that our agency partners are incredibly well equipped to expand the types of advertising offerings they can bring to their customers and the services that naturally come with those new forms of advertising. We’re not ready to announce anything just yet but are excited about the possibilities.